Launch failure after Download of 2.80 & 2.79 on windows 10
I think what's going on here is that double clicking the zip file in the file browser doesn't actually extract the zip file contents, it just gives you a view of the zip file contents. That looks just like if you had extracted the zip file.

What you should do is:


Download the zip file
Right click it and do "Extract all"
After extraction is done, you should now be able to execute blender.exe from within the extracted folder.


One thing to look out for is that inside the not-extracted zip file, blender.exe will have a generic (non-Blender) icon.

After "Extract all", blender.exe will have the Blender icon.

The above instructions solved my problems when trying to run Blender 2.80 RC2 from a zip file on Windows.